Hello data travelers,

cudos to the palemoon.org project, an excellent fork of Mozilla Firefox (migration is a breeze, even the hotkeys & shortcuts are the same like ALT+D “select address bar”).

strange thing: when starting palemoon via mozo (excellent program! cudos!) created entry in the MATE Desktop menu “it just works” 😀
but when linking to it like:

ln -sv /home/user/software/browser/palemoon/palemoon /usr/bin/pale

which would allow starting it via Alt+F2 and typing “pale” + ENTER

(which is often much faster than the searching for the icon in a menu, in a taskbar or on the desktop via mouse)

but results in: “Could not find the Mozilla runtime.”

Searching the forum it says “needs to be accessible as a file” and build a wrapper, so tried a bunch of stuff.

what ultimately WORKED was:

1. instead of linking directly to the palemoon-bin
2. create a script /usr/bin/pale with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
/home/user/software/browser/palemoon/palemoon https://callthissiteforstartup.com

3. mark it runnable

chmod +x /usr/bin/pale

4. now running it like opening up a new non-root terminal and typing pale works just fine 😀 also Alt+F2 startup no problem 😀

so the “trick” was to pass it an argument 😀 and it stopped complaining.

now to get to lightning fast 3-letter startup the user can do: (allowing to start the very-often-used-program with Alt+F2 typing “pal” + ENTER)

ln -sv /usr/bin/pale /usr/bin/pal

CHEEERS! 😀

PS: for completeness the mozo created ~/Desktop/pale.desktop has the following content:

cat pale.desktop
#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Icon=/home/user/software/browser/palemoon/browser/chrome/icons/default/default48.png
Icon[en_US]=/home/user/software/browser/palemoon/browser/chrome/icons/default/default48.png
Exec=/home/user/software/browser/palemoon/palemoon
Name[en_US]=pale
Name=pale

now it starts like a charm 😀

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